We’ve had the phone/broadband connection in our new house for over 3 months now and I still don’t even know what the landline phone number is. Calls on our Sky provided line have a 16.9p access charge plus 11.5ppm – ie a one minute call costs 28.4p.

Given we both have more inclusive mobile minutes than we ever use it doesn’t seem to make any sense to make outgoing calls on it but, especially as Katie works from home (and mobile reception in the basement is really poor) having a landline for incoming only might be a good idea.

Has anyone done anything clever with Voip phones (so outgoing calls automatically redirected to Voip?)? Are there any decent home phones available – sound quality on DECT phones always seems poor. If you’re going to use for outgoing need a way of syncing to our address books (which are on iCloud/MacOS address book)

Could you VOIP via your mobile? There must be tons of apps for that?

In fact on our set up (iPhones on EE) the phone will automatically use wifi if the mobile signal is crap – though I think that’s probably outgoing only obviously.

Have a look at your mobile service provider apps for one that allows calls over wifi. Problem solved.
On O2 its TuGo. NB they are a little intrusive on O2 and collect everything you do on the phone with comms. I have to regularly delete all the duplicated messages and call records that automatically end up on the app.

GrahamS – the Wifi Calling on EE is two way and also works for texts and voicemails as well – so basically if your phone can connect to wifi it will work exactly as normal even if there’s no network signal.

Ah cool, cheers I didn’t know that, that’s even better. 🙂

WiFi Calling on EE works brilliantly, It’s meant I actually get a signal at home now… which is a good or bad thing depending on how socialable I feeling at the time.

There are some DECT phones that can work through a landline, or over VOIP. eg from Gigaset. http://www.ligo.co.uk/gigaset-s810a-ip
I think Gigaset have better sound quality than most DECT phones. Seems some of them let you synchronize address books.

Or you could setup a server running Asterisk, to redirect calls from the landline to VOIP etc. Though I think it may be quite complicated. http://www.asterisk.org/

WiFi Calling on EE works brilliantly

That’s interesting. I’d heard poor reports on Wifi calling from a few people as I think it works on ANY wifi network – a friend uses public wifi spots (eg BT cloud or whatever it’s called now) and his phone would be trying to make calls using them when there was strong mobile signal. Also, handoff between mobile and wifi not working. Battery life issues etc etc. Maybe it’s improved (and he was on O2).

I think Gigaset have better sound quality than most DECT phones

Gigaset = Siemens I think. Were always the best DECT phones but the newer ones we had wern’t as good as the originals.

+1 for ee wifi calling